100 Years Of Genocide, Or Why My Grandfather Didn’t Want To Be Armenian

This April will mark the centenary of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocide. This article was written to honor the occasion.

A 106-year-old woman sits in front of her home guarding it with a rifle, in Degh village, near the city of Goris in southern Armenia. (Image Credit: Armineh Johannes / UN Photo)

If my grandfather had it his way, he never would have been born Armenian.

A Bostonian to the bone, and a fish monger at that, he once spent an afternoon telling me about all the work he lost on account of his race. “To hell with it,” he said. “It’s not worth it.”

He was descended from Soo-ren Nahigian, an atheist Bible salesman who changed the “i” in his last name to “y” on the hope that it would get folks to stop pronouncing the “g” like a “j.” In the 100 years or so of Nahigyan family history, it has yet to do the trick.

Soo-ren came to America for his education, but when it was time to return to Armenia his father wrote to him saying don’t come back. My great-great grandfather was Kashador – or maybe Kachador – Nahigian, and he died with the rest of the Armenian Nahigians in 1915.

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"All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb. It is for the reason which grows out of my medieval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth."